In communication networks, the network traffic may be handled according to a type of the traffic (e.g., content) according to Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. For example, network traffic related to a specific service may be directed to a bearer offering a certain QoS level. In this respect, a bearer is considered to be an information transmission context or path of defined characteristics, e.g. capacity, delay and/or bit error rate. Typically, a number of bearers are established between a gateway node of a mobile communication network and a user equipment, e.g., a mobile phone or other type of mobile terminal. A bearer may carry downlink (DL) data traffic in a direction from the network to the user equipment, and may carry data traffic in an uplink (UL) direction from the user equipment to the network. In the gateway node and in the user equipment the data traffic, which includes a plurality of IP data packets (IP: “Internet Protocol”, which may be the IP Version 4, also referred to as IPv4, or the IP Version 6, also referred to as IPv6) can be filtered, e.g. using IP 5-tuple packet filters, thereby directing the IP data packets to a desired bearer.
As shown in FIG. 1, a communication network environment includes a user equipment (UE) 10, which may also be referred to as a terminal, that is connected to a Radio Network Controller (RNC) 20. The RNC 20 is coupled to a gateway 30. The gateway 30 may be a Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN) providing a connection of GPRS-based services to one or more external packet data networks. The gateway 30 may also be a System Architecture Evolution Gateway (SAE GW) according to the 3GPP TSs.
In addition, the mobile communication network includes a policy controller 40, which is implemented as a Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) according to the 3GPP TSs. The policy controller 40 may be implemented by dedicated hardware and/or includes software functions executed by a processor. The gateway 30 and the policy controller 40 are typically regarded as components of a core network 42. The policy controller 40 communicates with the gateway 30 via a signaling path 32, which may be implemented using the Gx interface according to the 3GPP TSs. The policy controller 40 may further communicate with other network functions using a control signaling path 44, which may be implemented using the Rx interface according to the 3GPP TSs.
In this context, a user may request from the UE 10 a certain content. The request is sent to the RNC 20 and then via a signaling path 22, which may be a default GPRS tunneling protocol (GTP), to the gateway 30. A deep packet inspection (DPI) module 34, provided inside the gateway 30, is configured to intercept the request from UE 10 and send it to a request analyzer module 36, also provided inside the gateway 30. The request analyzer module 36 determines whether a dedicated bearer needs to be established and depending on a result of this determination, an application function (AF) 38 requests the dedicated bearer with a predetermined QoS from the policy controller 40. As a result of this, the policy controller 40 establishes a second bearer 24 between the gateway 30 and the UE 20. The policy controller 40 uses communication paths 44 and 46 to inform both the gateway 30 and the UE 10 to establish the second bearer 24. Now, the content is received by the UE 10 on the second bearer 24 that has the desired QoS. It is noted that the content that is transferred to the UE 10 resides in a content delivery network (CDN) server 39, which is located inside the gateway 30
It is noted that new developments in the RNC make possible the delivery of content to the UE directly from the RNC, i.e., the RNC has a CDN function like a cache or an application acceleration server. However, these functionalities situated in the RNC in the current 3GPP architecture cannot be prioritized using existing QoS mechanisms. Thus, there is a need to improve the existing RNC functionalities.